Dividing Line: How The Division blends RPGs with shooter action

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Ubisoft's The Division was one of the first games announced for the current console generation. Set in New York after a disturbingly plausible bioterror event leads to the shutdown and quarantine of the entire city, players control a Strategic Homeland Division member embroiled in an effort to reclaim the city and restore order.

That it's only just about to be released, almost three years after it was revealed to great fanfare at E3 in 2013, shows the scale and ambition of the title. It also hints at some of the turmoil that has followed its development. WIRED goes hands on to see if it lives up to its potential.

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That may appear to be a self-evident statement. After all, the game prides itself on what creative director Magnus Jansen calls its three pillars -- Open world. Online. RPG. But what that fails to encompass is just how much of an RPG it actually is.

After decades of video games presenting the role-playing game as something overwhelmingly steeped in fantasy or science fiction, it's strange, almost bewildering to find yourself immersed in a world as realistic as The Division, yet be faced with all the trappings of the genre. It forces even more of a double-take when the game in question bears the Tom Clancy brand, immediately associating it with the likes Splinter Cell. These links are inaccurate; the two could hardly feel more disparate.

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The RPG basics are easy to spot. Gameplay mechanics such as levelling up have bled into practically every other style of game over the years, and on a surface level The Division may not seem particularly distinguishable. Plenty of other shooters now employ the shorthand of "bigger numbers = more power". But as you take down the criminals and violent opportunists that have filled the streets of a locked down New York, gaining experience for each victory or side mission completed, you soon see that it goes deeper.

Citizens in distress or roaming groups of enemies take the place of random battles. Downed foes drop loot; sometimes ammo, others health packs, others still variable pieces of armour or weaponry, each with their own stats and properties. Missions will leave you the freedom to follow the core story, or branch off to one of the hundreds of side missions you'll find dotted around the city. Even New York itself is built as you'd expect an RPG world to be -- certain areas are inaccessible until you've levelled up decontamination facilities in your home base, for instance.

Progression through The Division is mostly a matter of restoring functions to society, starting with your base of operations. Although it's largely an open world, Skyrim-style, an initial trio of core mssions see you rescuing key figures to provide medical, technological, and security services. Once these are established, subsequent missions can be tackled in any order, bolstering these areas and unlocking more skills as a bonus.

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Just as any RPG worth its salt gives you deep control over character progression, so too does The Division. Dive into the menu and you're presented with an initially overwhelming amount of specificity over talent and abilities, weapons and skills. Any unlocked skills can be redistributed at will, shifting character strengths from an all-rounder -- better suited to solo play -- to focusing on one of the three skillsets to help create balanced teams.

But what of its other pillars, online and open world? It turns out, the two are really almost one. Generally, you can be drawn into friends' missions ad hoc; wandering the streets of New York, you might join in on a shoot out, stick around for the rest of the quest in progress, or move on after getting some experience out of it.

Conversely, the Midtown area of Manhattan is the game's "Dark Zone", a seamlessly integrated area where player verus player encounters can take place. Split into six smaller areas, the region can be entered at any time. Unlike other titles' multiplayer modes, it's not sectioned off from the main game, but rather an integrated part of the wider world. Pleasantly, player behaviour was muted compared to, say, Call of Duty -- The Division's survivalist credentials rewarding more cautious play, and paradoxically more trusting play, perhaps. Anything uncovered in the Dark Zone can be "extracted" to the main area, but both it and co-op play can be avoided altogether if you prefer.

Aside from its mechanics, where The Division excels is its setting. This New York feels real, from the iconic locations such as Madison Square Garden and Grand Central Station to the accurately modelled residential areas such as Chelsea. The aesthetic of the city is spot on, filled with advertising and walls tagged with graffiti and street-art, buildings that can be entered and subways that can be explored.

For all it succeeds in though, this is a game that has clearly changed a lot since its earliest presentations to the public. A planned second screen mode, where teams of agents could have a member using a smart device to control a drone in the then-untitled PVP, has been dropped, and while it's a beautiful and incredibly detailed world, it doesn't quite live up to the visual promise of its earlier teases.

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It was also hard to get a feel for The Division's difficulty. Tackling one of the core rescue missions -- retrieving a doctor to re-establish medical facilities -- on hard, a four-player squad struggled to progress past an early wave of enemies, then successfully made it through the rest of the quest without incident. Whether that can be attributed to players gelling as a team or the challenge level having drastic peaks and troughs couldn't be determined from the time WIRED spent with the game.

Information overload is the game's biggest problem though, at least to begin with -- menus explode with details, enemies are highlighted with dozens of hit-zones when targeted, mission markers flash all over the map, and the depth of customisation can be daunting. Thankfully, these systems eventually coalesce into an understandable whole, but early on it's tricky to focus on what's actually useful.

The Division is a vast game, with a wealth of options as to how each player wants to approach the crisis at hand. The realistic setting lends it an urgency other RPGs sometimes lack, while feeling more immersive and a shade more compulsive than Ubisoft's other open-world affairs such as Assassin's Creed or FarCry. Its challenge will be in sustaining that immersion over the course of days, rather than hours, of play time.